Category: literature

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Thoughts on Pop Culture

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In the NY Times magazine this weekend, Deborah Solomon (DS) interviewed Douglas Coupland (DC), a writer best known for coining the term “Generation X.” He had an interesting point of view regarding popular culture that I felt was apt to share:

DS: How would you define the current cultural moment?
DC: I’m starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the worlds they want to read and the music they listen to. You don’t have the broader trends like you used to.
DS: Sure you do. What about Harry Potter and Taylor Swift and “Avatar,” to name a few random phenomena?
DC: They’re not great cultural megatrends, like disco, which involved absolutely everyone in t he culture. Now, everyone basically is their own microculture, their own nanoculture, their own generation.

Coupland’s thoughts really resonate with me. Back in the middle of last year when Michael Jackson passed away, one of the reasons that the outpouring of grief was so large was because it just might have been the last time that so many people could be unified towards a cultural event and everyone sort of felt this in their bones. His death was in a way the death rattle of the Super Culture that we’ve been used to for so long. I’m curious to see if this line of reasoning – that a Super Culture is dead – holds up over the next few years or if I look back on this entry and think, “Oh, how quaint.” I guess only time will tell…

literature

RIP JD

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The Onion wrote a news article about the passing of JD Salinger in the style of “A Catcher in the Rye” which made me more than chuckle. I think that if you read it you will laugh and then some too. It begins, and I quote:

In this big dramatic production that didn’t do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud

RIP to America’s Favorite Recluse. He owed no one anything. He already gave more than enough.

literature

Six Word Stories

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33 writers. 5 designers. 6-word science fiction.
We’ll be brief: Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) and is said to have called it his best work. I myself have been writing poetry for years and believe that one of my shortest poems is probably my best. Along these lines, Wired Magazine asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves (this was back in 2006 – I wrote a draft of this post then and never got around to publishing it). While Arthur C. Clarke refused to trim his (“God said, ‘Cancel Program GENESIS.’ The universe ceased to exist.”), the rest are concise masterpieces.
After the jump, feel free to read the rest. I’ll keep you in suspense about my own poem until next week when I post it.
Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.
– William Shatner
Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer?
– Eileen Gunn
Vacuum collision. Orbits diverge. Farewell, love.
– David Brin
Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
– Joss Whedon
Automobile warranty expires. So does engine.
– Stan Lee
Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
– Alan Moore
Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
– Margaret Atwood
His penis snapped off; he’s pregnant!
– Rudy Rucker
From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings.
– Gregory Maguire
Internet “wakes up?” Ridicu -no carrier.
– Charles Stross
With bloody hands, I say good-bye.
– Frank Miller
Wasted day. Wasted life. Dessert, please.
– Steven Meretzky
“Cellar?” “Gate to, uh … hell, actually.”
– Ronald D. Moore
Epitaph: Foolish humans, never escaped Earth.
– Vernor Vinge
It cost too much, staying human.
– Bruce Sterling
We kissed. She melted. Mop please!
– James Patrick Kelly
It’s behind you! Hurry before it
– Rockne S. O’Bannon
I’m your future, child. Don’t cry.
– Stephen Baxter
1940: Young Hitler! Such a cantor!
– Michael Moorcock
Lie detector eyeglasses perfected: Civilization collapses.
– Richard Powers
I’m dead. I’ve missed you. Kiss … ?
– Neil Gaiman
The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.
– Orson Scott Card
Kirby had never eaten toes before.
– Kevin Smith
Rained, rained, rained, and never stopped.
– Howard Waldrop
To save humankind he died again.
– Ben Bova
We went solar; sun went nova.
– Ken MacLeod
Husband, transgenic mistress; wife: “You cow!”
– Paul Di Filippo
“I couldn’t believe she’d shoot me.”
– Howard Chaykin
Don’t marry her. Buy a house.
– Stephen R. Donaldson
Broken heart, 45, WLTM disabled man.
– Mark Millar
TIME MACHINE REACHES FUTURE!!! … nobody there …
– Harry Harrison
Tick tock tick tock tick tick.
– Neal Stephenson
Easy. Just touch the match to
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Special Web-only edition: We were unable to include these 59 stories in the print magazine.
New genes demand expression — third eye.
– Greg Bear
K.I.A. Baghdad, Aged 18 – Closed Casket
– Richard K. Morgan
WORLD’S END. Sic transit gloria Monday.
– Gregory Benford
Epitaph: He shouldn’t have fed it.
– Brian Herbert
Batman Sues Batsignal: Demands Trademark Royalties.
– Cory Doctorow
Heaven falls. Details at eleven.
– Robert Jordan
Bush told the truth. Hell froze.
– William Gibson
whorl. Help! I’m caught in a time
– Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel
Nevertheless, he tried a third time.
– James P. Blaylock
God to Earth: “Cry more, noobs!”
– Marc Laidlaw
Help! Trapped in a text adventure!
– Marc Laidlaw
Thought I was right. I wasn’t.
– Graeme Gibson
Lost, then found. Too bad.
– Graeme Gibson
Three to Iraq. One came back.
– Graeme Gibson
Rapture postponed. Ark demanded! Which one?
– David Brin
Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.
– David Brin
Bang postponed. Not Big enough. Reboot.
– David Brin
Temporal recursion. I’m dad and mom?
– David Brin
Time Avenger’s mistaken! It wasn’t me…
– David Brin
Democracy postponed. Whence franchise? Ask Diebold…
– David Brin
Cyborg seeks egg donor, object ___.
– David Brin
Deadline postponed. Five words enough…?
– David Brin
Metrosexuals notwithstanding, quiche still lacks something.
– David Brin
Brevity’s virtue? Wired saves adspace. Subscribe!
– David Brin
Death postponed. Metastasized cells got organized.
– David Brin
Microsoft gave us Word. Fiat lux?
– David Brin
Mind of its own. Damn lawnmower.
– David Brin
Singularity postponed. Datum missing. Query Godoogle?
– David Brin
Please, this is everything, I swear.
– Orson Scott Card
I saw, darling, but do lie.
– Orson Scott Card
Osama’s time machine: President Gore concerned.
– Charles Stross
Sum of all fears: AND patented.
– Charles Stross
Ships fire; princess weeps, between stars.
– Charles Stross
Mozilla devastates Redmond, Google’s nuke implicated.
– Charles Stross
Will this do (lazy writer asked)?
– Ken MacLeod
Cryonics: Disney thawed. Mickey gnawed. Omigawd.
– Eileen Gunn
WIRED stimulates the planet: Utopia blossoms!
– Paul Di Filippo
Clones demand rights: second Emancipation Proclamation.
– Paul Di Filippo
MUD avatars rebel: virtual Independence Day.
– Paul Di Filippo
We crossed the border; they killed us.
– Howard Waldrop
H-bombs dropped; we all died.
– Howard Waldrop
Your house is mine: soft revolution.
– Howard Waldrop
Warskiing; log; prop in face.
– Howard Waldrop
The Axis in WWII: haiku! Gesundheit.
– Howard Waldrop
Salinger story: three koans in fountain.
– Howard Waldrop
Finally, he had no more words.
– Gregory Maguire
There were only six words left.
– Gregory Maguire
In the beginning was the word.
– Gregory Maguire
Commas, see, add, like, nada, okay?
– Gregory Maguire
Weeping, Bush misheard Cheney’s deathbed advice.
– Gregory Maguire
Corpse parts missing. Doctor buys yacht.
– Margaret Atwood
Starlet sex scandal. Giant squid involved.
– Margaret Atwood
He read his obituary with confusion.
– Steven Meretzky
Time traveler’s thought: “What’s the password?”
– Steven Meretzky
I win lottery. Sun goes nova.
– Steven Meretzky
Steve ignores editor’s word limit and
– Steven Meretzky
Leia: “Baby’s yours.” Luke: “Bad news…”
– Steven Meretzky
Parallel universe. Bush, destitute, joins army.
– Steven Meretzky
Dorothy: “Fuck it, I’ll stay here.”
– Steven Meretzky

literature

Iron Man on Ice Coming Soon

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There are so many different and funny ways of announcing that Disney is buying Marvel for $4 billion. I was trying all morning to think of something catchy to say like how io9 wrote “The House of Mouse eats the House of Ideas” but sure enough my good friend and frequent lead generator for this blog Mr. Neu trumped me and gave me the title for this post.
I wonder if the Marvel Islands of Adventure theme park is going to be shut down now as its run by Universal and not Disney. I wonder how badly the X-Men would crush Captain Hook and his band of pirates. I wonder what the Incredibles would look like if that movie was remade with the actual Fantastic Four replacing the pseudo-F4 that starred in that movie. I can go on and on but I won’t – I’ll just wait to see how this plays out .
The goal of the sale according to the call that was held to announce the sale “is not to rebrand Marvel as Disney but to shine a spotlight on the Marvel brand.” I sincerely hope that is the case.

literature

Butterflies In The Sky No More

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It is with great sadness that I report that a beloved television show of mine is ending its run today. After 26 years, “Reading Rainbow” is going off of the air.
My all time favorite episode was about the book titled Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport. Another great episode was about The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash and on the theme of eating, I really loved the Gregory the Terrible Eater episode which was about a very picky goat who would only want to eat fruits, vegetables, eggs, and orange juice, and refused the usual goat diet of shoes and tin cans.
Reading Rainbow debuted in 1983 – a tremendously formative year for me (I was six) as “Return of the Jedi” debuted in the theaters and GI Joe and He-Man also debuted on TV. Put it this way, while I’ve seen a lot of things in 2009, I don’t think anything thing I’ve seen had the transformative effect that one of those shows I listed above had on me, lest the power of those four shows combined.
It seems that no one — not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show’s broadcast rights and while the funding crunch is partially to blame, the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming.
The change started with the Department of Education under the Bush administration, he explains, which wanted to see a much heavier focus on the basic tools of reading — like phonics and spelling. I know the basics are important but I still feel compelled to say “boo.”
“Reading Rainbow” will live on in repeats and on DVDs and really, just as the show always told us, we shouldn’t be watching television anyway. Take a look – its in a book. Reading Rainbow.

literature

Happy Birthday Theodor Geisel

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If you aren’t familiar with Theo Geisel, maybe you know him as Dr. Seuss. I am reading plenty of Seuss books these days and flat out love his rhyme scheme. If I could walk around all day talking like either Yoda or Dr. Seuss, I think I would choose Dr. Seuss.
Today was his birthday so to honor this auspicious date, Google remade its logo Seuss-style:
seuss_google.jpg
Even though he passed away in 1991, I have a feeling that his legacy will live on for a long, long, long time.
Via Phyll

literature

Telephone Poles

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I never read John Updike until after he passed away and started to because numerous media outlets wrote lengthy tomes about his genius. “If I am a writer and a serious student of literature, I must read him” I thought.
One thing consistently stood out in all the obits / reviews: he wrote flowing, lovely, dense descriptions based on the idea that a flower is simply beautiful and there need not be any hidden meaning present when describing its loveliness. Does one always need to read into things? A rose is a rose is a rose, right? Up until now, I only knew that he and I shared the same birthday and that his four most popular books had Rabbit in the title (always helpful during Jeopardy). As I’ve always struggled with attaching meaning to the super cute descriptions that I develop I thought, here’s an author for me!
The New Yorker (where he got his start and which he contributed to steadily for his entire literary career) posted a number of his “Talk of the Town” pieces, poems and snippets of fiction and essays which really gave me a good introduction to his oeuvre.
When reading his material, one poem in particular (which originally appeared in the January 21, 1961 edition) really stood out. Therefore, I’ve posted it below for hopefully others to enjoy.
Telephone Poles
They have been with us a long time.
They will outlast the elms.
Our eyes, like the eyes of a savage sieving the trees
In his search for game,
Run through them. They blend along small-town streets
Like a race of giants that have faded into mere mythology.
Our eyes, washing clean of belief,
Lift incredulous to their fearsome crowns of bolts, trusses, struts, nuts, insulators, and such
Barnacles as compose
These weathered encrustations of electrical debris –
Each a Gorgon’s head, which, seized right,
Could stun us to stone.
Yet they are ours. We made them.
See here, where the cleats of linemen
Have roughed a second bark
Onto the bald trunk. And these spikes
Have been driven sideways at intervals handy for human legs.
The Nature of our construction is in every way
A better fit than the Nature it displaces.
What other tree can you climb where the birds’ twitter
‘Unscrambled, is English? True, their thing share id negligible,
But then again there is not that tragic autumnal
Casting-off of leaves to outface annually.
These giants are more constant than evergreens
By never being green.

literature

David Foster Wallace, Dies at 46

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Sadly, I learned from of all places a friend’s Facebook status that one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace, died at age of 46 of an apparent suicide this past weekend.
The NYT obit on DFW is a well written, well researched piece on the author. As they put it, he wrote “prodigiously observant, exuberantly plotted, grammatically and etymologically challenging, philosophically probing and culturally hyper-contemporary novels, stories and essays.” That is quite a mouthful but I couldn’t agree more.
Infinite Jest, the book that he is most well known for, is one of my all time favorite books. This is due in large part to the effort I expended and the difficulty I had in reading it coupled with the satisfaction I gained by finishing it. I would equate the experience with climbing an arduously steep and rugged mountain which at its apex gives way to the most extraordinary view imaginable. Other than The Silmarillion, which took me three attempts to read, I cannot recall a bigger literary challenge that I faced and won.
Not only was he a terrifically inventive novelist, he a great essayist (which is a dying – no pun intended – art) as well. When I went to the US Open for the first time last year to see Andy Roddick play Roger Federer, I brought DFW 6,000 plus word essay from 2006 titled Federer as Religious Experience with me to re-read on the train. Luckily the train ride took awhile because like all DFW pieces, it was dense, fun and damn good.
As Gawker notes, this terrible occurance was sort of preordained. In a 2005 speech at Kenyon College implied, he was not unfamiliar with the heft of existence:

[L]earning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Thanks Dahlia for inspiring me to read Infinite Jest.
Goodbye David. The world just lost a brilliant mind.

literature

Anathem is Now At a Store Near You

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Neal Stephenson’s new novel Anathem is now in stores and I cannot wait to devour every one of its yummy 960 pages.
Back in August Wired wrote a great profile on Stephenson which I suggest you read. I learned quite a bit about him that I did not already know and found it quite interesting.
If you are thinking to yourself right now “Who is Neal Stephenson?” and/or you haven’t read any of his other books, like Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon or the three book Baroque Cycle, you are seriously missing out on some fantastic literature. Along with King and Gaiman, Stephenson is hands down my favorite living author. Please do not make me rank them. Please.
To get all sorts of fired up about Anathem, please watch the interview below. In it Neal talks about the themes that make up his new novel:

Last but not least, check out this blurb from Cryptonomicon that I posted back when I was just starting this blog.
Some via Neu

literature

I've Got A Fever And The Doctor Ordered More Dark Tower

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Stephen King’s site today informed me that Dark Tower: The Long Road Home #1 will be arriving in stores at 12:01 AM, March 5th, 2008 (at participating comic stores). The writing crew of Robin Furth & Peter David and artists Jae Lee & Richard Isanove will be joined by special guest variant cover artist (and Marvel Editor-In-Chief) Joe Quesada to create the second limited series inspired by Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower series.
Just like the first one, The Gunslinger Born, this limited series will be overseen by Stephen King himself. Just like the first one, Dark Tower: The Long Road Home explores a chapter in Roland’s life only hinted at in the novels. Just like the first one, I expect it to be friggin sweet, kick total ass and to be just what the doctor ordered. One can never get enough of the Dark Tower mythos – not me at least.
Is it March yet?